Full Clip: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony Break Down Their Entire Catalogue

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Layzie: “Faces of Death was the very first album we put out. We were B.O.N.E. Enterprise at that time. We were just trying to make music and were still in high school doing our thing. Our main objective was to show everybody in school that we can do music besides rapping in the lunchroom. We were always fans of hip-hop. We were into everything from Biz Markie and Big Daddy Kane to NWA, which came from us being from the Midwest. People at school used to swear me and Krayzie were Kid N’ Play [laughs]. Then later they started calling us Kris Kross…we were kind of mad about that shit [laughs]. Everyone always ask us how we came up with our fast rap styles. The way I answer that is we were living in poverty. I remember when we were in 9th grade. This has to be 1989-1990 and we were doing this school talent show. What ended up happening is we got all geared up, spent all our money on some clothes and we ended up doing talent show—which we found out was a gong show…and we got gonged! [laughs]. Them motherfuckers were like, ‘Get your ass out of here with that Oriental shit!’” No one had ever heard that rap style before.”

Krayzie: “It was really hard to get people to take us seriously, especially before we got signed. People looked at us like, ‘What the fuck are y’all doing?’ The gong show story that Lay just told was so real. We ended up whipping somebody’s ass over that shit [laughs]. That’s how passionate we were about our music.”

Flesh: “I remember that! But looking back, our song selection might have had something to do with us getting gonged. We picked an old school doo-wop style and made it into a rap song. They gonged us and we didn’t know how to take that. But what’s even crazier is with that same doo-wop song we ended up using bits and pieces for a song we later recorded.”

Layzie: “You have to remember…we come from the city of the O’Jays and Gerald Levert, the Rude Boys…we have a whole bunch of soul in our background. We were singing way before we were rapping.”